Golf clubs are scattered everywhere inside TaylorMade Headquarters. It doesn’t matter what you do for the company; it’s a safe bet wherever you sit there’s a golf club within arm’s reach of your desk. Tomo Bystedt’s office is an extreme example. It’s a big space, but more than a dozen oversized TaylorMade golf bags line three walls of the room, most of them filled exclusively with irons. Some are from competitors, but most are TaylorMade irons from the past 15 years. And in the corner, cardboard boxes filled with more TaylorMade irons are stacked one on top of the other, almost to the ceiling.

Like most golfers, Bystedt scours his club collection from time to time in search of inspiration. As Senior Director of TaylorMade Irons, it’s his eye that matters most to every new iron design. He joined the company in 2006. Less than three years later, TaylorMade launched a product that changed the company’s trajectory. They were called Burner ’09 irons, and a case could be made that they were the impetus for the distance-craze that has dominated iron design ever since.

Tomo Bystedt (background), Senior Director of TaylorMade irons, in his office.

The way Bystedt tells the story, the Burner ’09 irons didn’t succeed just because of the distance they flew. “The performance was already there if you wanted to pay for it to a certain extent,” he said. “We sold $1,300 sets of clubs like RAC CGB that went just as far, but they were really big.” It’s true that most golfers enjoy hitting a 7-iron when their playing partner is hitting a 5-iron from the same distance, but not at any cost. At the time, $1,300 was a lot to spend on a set of irons. Consider the ego, too. Most golfers approach oversized irons like they do a fitness routine on the range. It might help them play better, but they skip it. People will look at them funny.

The Burner ’09 irons sold for just $699 and showcased a progressive design that’s typical now, but wasn’t eight years ago. The long irons were big, the mid irons were palatable and the short irons looked a lot like the the ones the pros play. The design appealed to both good and bad golfers, and as it turned out, members of both groups enjoyed the added distance the irons gave them. It’s one thing to make a great set of irons, Bystedt said; it’s another to make a set of irons that golfers will buy. That’s why the start of the iron-design process is always defining the target golfer. With 35 years of experience, however, TaylorMade rarely starts from scratch. The iron team knows almost exactly how it wants every new iron to look, feel and perform. That’s the easy part. The hard part is figuring out how to do it.

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Two decades ago, driver heads began rapidly increasing in size. A larger framework and more flexible club face helped engineers expand their “sweet spot.” The benefit was golfers could mishit a drive, and it would fly almost as far and straight as a perfect hit. The same concept is being applied to TaylorMade irons, but is far more challenging to implement. After all, a driver is one club that does one thing; it sends a ball as far and straight as possible. Exactly what defines iron performance is still hotly debated, both inside and outside TaylorMade’s walls. For some, performance is a blend of distance and forgiveness that can be measured on a launch monitor, but the vast majority of golfers evaluate irons less scientifically. The way an iron looks behind a ball, how it feels at impact, how it moves through the turf or how it looks in a golfer’s bag can ultimately be more important.

At TaylorMade, the iron design process officially begins 12-24 months before a set hits stores, but the company’s R&D team is often studying new concepts and technologies years earlier. It’s during the pre-design stages that TaylorMade’s engineers are dreaming up new technologies, and then demonstrating their advantages. The process is faster, more efficient and more accurate than it has ever been thanks to computer-aided design (CAD) tools, allowing the iron team to work on several projects at once: typically six or seven different irons, and multiple new technologies.

Related: Photos of TaylorMade irons from the last 35 years.

TaylorMade’s current best-selling irons are called M2. Their design began with the re-examination of their predecessor, TaylorMade’s RSi 1 irons, with the goal of lowering the center of gravity substantially. The first thing engineers did was “attack” different parts of the iron in CAD, said Bret Wahl, TaylorMade’s Vice President of R&D for Irons, Putters and Wedges. His team worked to remove as much weight from the top of the iron as possible, specifically the top line and the hosel. When Wahl started at TaylorMade 20 years ago, the company was just transitioning its club-design process. Club making was a learned trade at the time, and had designers handcrafting each individual iron, which became a “master” for production.

Bret Wahl, TaylorMade’s Vice President of R&D for Irons, Putters and Wedges.

“It was broad strokes then,” Wahl said. “CAD was helping us learn, but now it’s a very integrated process from start to finish. It drives everything … all the way down to the tools and manufacturing processes.”

When TaylorMade’s design team made the structure of the M2 irons thinner, the sound of the iron changed in step, and not for the better. The problem was expected, though, and much easier to fix than it used to be. Not too long ago in the iron-design process, engineers would have needed to have a prototype iron produced overseas, wait for it to arrive at HQ, and then take it to the range to learn exactly what it sounded like when a golfer hit it. Now, engineers use modal analysis to simulate the vibrations that occur at impact. They know what kind of vibrations create good sound, and getting the proper mix right is key. Audible vibrations, not the ones golfers feel in their hands, account for 90 percent of the “feel” of an iron, Wahl said.

To solve the M2’s sound problem, engineers created a stiff, three-dimensional badge in CAD that dampened vibrations without affecting performance. Every detail was modeled, down to the glue used to secure the badge to the cavity of irons, because the slightest change can have a major impact on the sound, performance and durability. That’s why every day, Bystedt is reviewing design changes with TaylorMade engineers. What he’s evaluating early in the design process aren’t actual irons, though. They’re 3-D printed prototypes made from a lightweight polymer, which are faster and more affordable to produce than metal prototypes. And while Bystedt and the engineering team are tweaking the features of a new iron, a separate design team is working concurrently to make it look cool. “We brief the design team on what we’re making, the technologies and visuals, so they can craft the next cool-looking thing,” Bystedt said. “We tell them, ‘These are the kind of consumers we’re going after. This is the kind of performance we’re seeing.'”

At this point in the process, TaylorMade’s iron team is working with only three irons in a set: a 4-iron, a 7-iron and a wedge, which speeds the process along. It’s much faster to tweak the designs of three iron heads than the usual eight. One thing that won’t significantly change at this point, at least if the irons are to make it to market on time, is the general weighting of the irons. The design team can’t say, “This iron looks so much better when we move weight up here.” The reality is certain technologies aren’t intrinsically good-looking, and they’re often excluded when their impact on performance is minimal.

Bystedt describes iron design as a series of doors, each door leading to the next. “You get through one door, and then there are all these challenges,” he said. “You solve them, unlocking the next door, and repeat the process.” When Bystedt approves an iron design for initial testing, which means a few hundred 4 irons, 7 irons and wedges are made in one of TaylorMade’s overseas facility, it may seem as though the process is essentially complete. That’s far from the truth.

Once the samples return, they’re given to a few different teams. Engineers can finally measure the performance of actual samples, not just computer models, and they check to make sure that all the predicted parameters are inline. Those samples are then passed to the durability team, which has the task of systematically destroying the clubs. “We want to break stuff so we understand how far we can push it,” said TaylorMade’s Matt Johnson, who leads the durability team. A machine rattles clubs viciously in a golf bag, and that may be the kindest test. Irons are exposed to UV light, submerged in salt water and golf-ball cannons fire shots at all parts of the club face in search of weak spots. Still, some clubs do break after they’re released to the public, and to Johnson it’s a good thing. “If no clubs are breaking, we’re not pushing our technology far enough,” he said.

Josh Dipert, TaylorMade’s Product Development Manager of Irons.

If an iron passes its durability tests, it moves to live player testing. Every month at a remote facility 30 minutes away from TaylorMade HQ, more than 150 golfers test clubs that may or may not become the next big thing. TaylorMade engineers keep data on every tester, so they know if a new iron is doing something special. “That’s when we know if we’ve hit the mark or not,” said Josh Dipert, TaylorMade’s Product Development Manager of Irons. “But that player also knows things we can’t capture. You can’t simulate is how the look of a top line is affecting a player.” The process can be repeated several times as designs are tweaked.

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You’d imagine there’s a large committee of people making decisions about new products at TaylorMade, but that’s not the way it works. While hundreds of people are ultimately involved in the design of its new irons, and hundreds more actually make them in a manufacturing process that’s far too complex to be covered in this story, a very small group of people are ultimately responsible for shepherding each iron from beginning to end. When an iron design is officially complete, it can be a bittersweet moment for them, especially Bystedt. For years a concept has been explored, which led to a new technology. To implement it, physics, material science and the limits of manufacturing techniques are all battled, along with the question, “Why would someone want to give these irons a hit?”

Then it’s over.

In movie-making, directors say a lot of their favorite scenes are left on the cutting room floor. The same is true for Bystedt and his irons. He really liked something, but it didn’t make sense for the project. He does get a sequel, though.

“A lot of times, it ends up on a future product,” he said with a smile.